Magic the Gathering Articles

The last few articles were all tournament related so I figured I should do something a bit more casual this time.

Early in my magic youth I was heavily drawn to the color black. I’m not even sure exactly why. I just knew it was color than the other colors. My first deck I actually thought of as decent (by my standards then at least, it looks like a pile now) was a mono black deck. It was an aggro control deck but not because I planned it that way. I really just threw every black card I thought was cool into it and tried to trim it down as much as possible. I don’t remember exactly what was in it card for card but I remember it was 83 cards.

I just finished going over the Standard format as it looked at Regionals. This format however is as good as gone though. By the time the next large Standard tournament comes around 9th Edition will have rotated in and 8th will be gone. This week I’m going to look at what will leave and how that affects the decks out there then look at what new cards are coming in then I’m going to build a new deck using 9th Edition (I wont make any promises as to whether is is good or not).

Its story time. In this article I’m going to go over my history as a magic player/deck builder and some of the most important decks I’ve built. I’ll also include the times I think I did the most improvement over and maybe a few reasons why.

In addition to free drafting the Saviors Beta on Magic Online provided me with the cards to play around with a few constructed formats. I was never able to really make anything tournament worthy in Standard or Online Extended but I did manage to make a pretty decent Block Constructed deck.

I can say without a doubt that this is the best multiplayer deck I have ever built. It wins more often than not when I play it which actually is a much bigger feat in multiplayer. For a duel deck you are doing fine if your win percentage is above 50%. In multiplayer the more players there are the harder it is to win. Really you just want your odds to be better than 1/n for a multiplayer game of n players. This deck wins at least 60-70% of the time. Better yet it isn’t nearly as annoying to play against as a lot of my other multiplayer decks can be (Vedalken Shackles and Tradewind Rider are the first offenders that spring to mind though are not nearly all of them). I think the reason it doesn’t seem all that annoying is that when you really look at it, it really is just a bunch of mana and a big pile of burn. Hell even some of the lands deal damage.

I’ve posted the deck before and talked briefly about it but this time I’ll go through it card by card and discuss everything in detail. I’ll also cover cards that were either in the deck at one time or that might be good in the deck but I don’t own.

Today’s article is all about the red deck. I’ll go though the various different types of red decks and the differences between them. I wont go into too much detail in the history because there is no way I could do a better job than Mike Flores. I suggest you give that article a read first.

Probably the weirdest thing about the red decks is how people blindly label them all the same thing. The common labels that get thrown around incorrectly are Sligh, Red Deck Wins, and Ponza. Goblins is the other deck I’ll cover but it tends to be a bit more obvious and doesn’t get mislabeled like the others.

I’ve wanted to talk about aggro decks for a while now but could never decide on which one. After Branden’s request of discussing the Stompy deck I ran in Type 3 I figured this is a good a choice as any.

There are essentially two ways to design and play an aggro deck without turning it into an aggro-control deck. The first is the all out weenie approach. You find the most aggressive creatures possible with the smallest mana curve possible. When playing the deck you go for the swarm and kill method. For an example of this strategy we are all very familiar with look at BJ’s Elf deck. If left unchecked he can easily amass a very large army of elves and Overrun for the win by turn 5. The major weakness of this type of deck is that you are often one well-timed Pyroclasm away from defeat. If they turn your army of small dudes into 1-3 little dudes going in for the kill becomes more difficult. Examples of creatures you find in this type of deck include any good creature that costs 1-2 mana and has at least two power, one-drops especially (Savannah Lions, Jackal Pup, Jungle Lion, Carnophage).

The second type of aggro is a little more conservative. It basically just always wants a threat on the table. You can drop a few creatures that are better than what is on the board at the time and just attack with them until they are dealt with. You then drop a few more. This method is a bit slower but wont scoop to Wrath of God. Also creatures that cost 3-4 mana are more common than in the weenie builds. Examples of creatures found in this type of deck include Troll Ascetic, Blastoderm, Arc-Slogger, Hypnotic Specter, and Nantuko Shade. These type of decks can be aggro control decks like Fish or Sligh (the original Sligh not the weenie deck people call Sligh now which is actually Deadguy Red) but don’t have to be. An example of a non aggro-control aggro deck of this type would be Fires.

Today we are going to focus on the first type of aggro, the weenie deck.

I’m going to take a look at my Type 3 Stompy deck and explain each of the card choices and some of the cards that were in earlier versions but eventually got cut as well as cards that might be in the deck if I owned any.